Biography: Colin McCahon
 

Colin McCahon was born in Timaru, New Zealand in 1919. He was educated in Dunedin and enrolled as a part-time student in the King Edward Technical College Art School in 1937. He began exhibiting paintings in 1939. In 1942 he married fellow painter Anne Hamblett. From 1944-48 they lived in Mapua, Tahunanui, and Nelson. They moved to Christchurch in 1948, by which time McCahon was exhibiting regularly.

In July-August of 1951 McCahon travelled to Melbourne for six weeks and saw the collection of European paintings in the National Gallery of Victoria. He studied with the artist Mary Cockburn-Mercer for two weeks as a paying student in her Collins Street studio. In 1953 the McCahon family moved to Auckland, where McCahon worked at the Auckland City Art Gallery, firstly as a cleaner, then as a temporary attendant. By 1956 he was Keeper of the Gallery and Deputy Director until his departure in 1964.

From 1964 to 1971 McCahon lectured in painting at the University of Auckland School of Fine Arts, leaving to concentrate on painting full-time. A survey and national tour of his work was organised by the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1972.

McCahon was invited to exhibit a selection of his works as part of the Fifth Biennale of Sydney in 1984. The exhibition 'I will need words: Colin McCahon's word and number paintings' contained twenty-two paintings and drawings including One, and represented the first opportunity for an international audience to see a comprehensive and coherent group of McCahon's works. The exhibition travelled to the 1984 Edinburgh Festival. Writing in Studio International on McCahon's presence in the Sydney Biennale, the Australian curator Judy Annear declared that: 'McCahon's work placed him at last, after nearly fifty years within the isolation of his home country, as a major painter in a global context'.¹ McCahon produced no new work after 1980 due to debilitating illness, and died in Auckland in 1987.

Footnotes:

1. Colin McCahon, artist's statement in Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys, Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, 1988, p. 3.

 
© copyright 2001, The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Australia

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